


I Dug Some Graves You'll Never Find

by astrugglingstoic



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Homecoming, JBB Recovering from Some Shit, Let's Get That Angst, Lovers' Reunion: Round Three, M/M, One (1) Eureka Moment, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, That Security Deposit Is Definitely No Longer Refundable, The Continual Destruction of Steve's DC Apartment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24739159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrugglingstoic/pseuds/astrugglingstoic
Summary: It feels like old times as an asthmatic, now struggling to gather air and wet his mouth. He sits up gingerly and shoves aside the first hundred things he wants to say before croaking, “Hey, Buck.” When he gets no response, he adds, “I’ve been looking for you.”Bucky has transcended the stillness and rigidity that suggest unease; he’s downright statuesque, forcibly immobile. “I know.” But his voice is the same as it’s always been if a little rusty, a welcome sound in the dark, against the rain.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 8
Kudos: 33





	I Dug Some Graves You'll Never Find

**Author's Note:**

> _I was not caught though many tried  
>  I live among you well disguised  
> I had to leave my life behind  
> I dug some graves you'll never find  
> The story’s told with facts and lies  
> I have a name but nevermind_
> 
> \- Leonard Cohen

Steve tastes so good, despite not particularly tasting like anything. It’s just a mind trick, a veil of contentment draped over his senses to make everything seem richer, _better._ The world tends to shine brighter when you’re happy, and he’s positively aglow in Steve’s bed, warm and comfortable and safe.

Underneath Steve, he’s naked, his bare side peeking out modestly from shoulder to ankle where the covers run short. If this were a scene in a movie, he’d be the audience and the costar, simultaneously. He’s watching the scene from across the room, but he’s in it, too; he feels nothing, but he feels everything, too.

Steve is paler than him, glimmering in the moonbeams, but _pale_ seems too faulting a word even though Steve’s big and healthy now— _fair,_ he would say. Steve’s hand on his bent leg, as it brushes over his knee and thigh and hip, makes him look tan in comparison. 

It’s not sex, exactly. Intuitively, he knows Steve is naked as well, that there’s pleasure in what they’re doing, but his awareness doesn’t stretch further than that.

His head is pillowed on the arm Steve has curled behind his neck and around his shoulders. He hasn’t been held in a very long time. Steve’s body hovers above him like a lean-to, and he seeks shelter beneath its frame.

The euphoria rolls over him in golden waves until he has to laugh or cry or explode because he’s flooded and bursting and unable to keep all of it to himself. Nothing is more beautiful than Steve, massive and calm and intent like a king in his rightful domain, staring down at him with adoration, tracing his jawline with a fingertip so that by the time it reaches his chin, his face is already tilting up for a kiss.

* * *

It is not a memory.

The pieces of his past that come back to him are complete, even if they themselves are fragments of a greater memory, even if they are without context. They have consistency and dimension; they can stand on their own.

He knows it is not a memory because the components—subject, setting, and event—do not align and do not hold up under further, methodical dissection. Being Captain America and then also an Avenger means that Steve Rogers’ whereabouts and exploits are more often than not matters of historical and public record; he can pin Rogers to very specific locations at very specific times, which proves quite helpful when his own mind fails him. 

Essentially, he determines there was no possible occasion in the last seventy years for Steve Rogers and himself to intimately engage. 

He arrives at this conclusion as follows: 1) In the not-memory, Steve Rogers is serum-enhanced, and he is fitted with his cybernetic arm; 2) Captain America and the Winter Soldier did not functionally coexist until 2014, after Steve Rogers’ exhumation from the Arctic and his reactivation from cryostasis; 3) Steve Rogers did not recognize the Winter Soldier as Bucky Barnes until the bridge. Immediately following this incident, he returned to the base in the bank vault and was wiped. He remembered and forgot Steve Rogers within the same hour; 4) From the vault, he was dispatched to the helicarriers, which then led to the Potomac.

So, it is not a memory. Not only did it never happen, it _could not_ have happened. 

It is not a memory.

It is far worse.

It is a dream.

* * *

He wakes up in Zagreb, overwarm in four layers and stifling his gasps into wild but silent heaves of breath. Inside his jeans, his cock is sticky and swollen and hot.

It’s not his first dream since the river, or his second, or his tenth. A part of him wants that. _Bucky,_ his subconscious—the same thing really.

Indignation flares through him as he glowers at the bulge in his pants. He might’ve shed his handlers, but his body still isn’t his own. He has to share it. 

In all fairness, Bucky has a better claim to this body. Bucky was here first. Bucky laid the foundation. Bucky provided substance. Bucky has even spent more time in this body, if you compare twenty-seven years of living to several weeks or months of active duty every decade.

He’s just a parasite inhabiting a host. He doesn’t blame Bucky for trying to flush him out with a deluge of old memories and impulses. But he doesn’t want to be erased again either. He doesn’t want to descend into oblivion, like he did in the cryostasis chamber or the chair, and not know when, _if_ he would ever resurface.

Ironically, he has HYDRA to blame for his persevering survival instinct. Self-preservation had been deeply ingrained into him as a part of his programming. He wasn’t allowed to die until HYDRA permitted him to. 

So, he has decided to compromise with Bucky Barnes instead of risk facing eradication. Mutualism is better than mutually assured destruction.

They negotiate, quid pro quo.

Bucky got Steve broken but alive on a riverbank; he got a one-way trip to Europe, no goodbyes.

Bucky gets notebooks filled with scraps of himself—any memories, preferences, and idiosyncrasies that return; he gets notebooks filled with his brainwashing regimen, mission reports, and intel on HYDRA. Neither one of them gets forgotten.

Bucky gets coverage of Steve via the news, social media, leaked S.H.I.E.L.D. files, and the HYDRA dossier; he gets to refrain from any contact with Rogers or his associates.

Now Bucky is insistently demanding new terms. Bucky wants to see Steve in the flesh, no substitutes. Bucky has nothing of equal value to leverage for such a grand request; instead, Bucky begs and harangues and monomaniacally force-feeds him Steve Rogers content day in and day out. 

“You aren’t gonna lay off, are you?” he asks, staring at the spiderweb cracks in the ceiling. He knocks his thin blanket away with a vicious kick and unzips his jeans to relieve the pressure, glaring contemptuously at his cock as it twitches in his underwear. Three guesses what _it_ wants him to do.

He lost his dick in the divorce settlement, along with his heart and half of his brain. Bucky gave up the arm, naturally.

“Fine. _One_ freebie, you _importunate_ motherfucker.” He rolls over onto his stomach and tries to smother his smug cock to death.

* * *

The thunderstorm covers the sounds of Bucky’s footsteps, though he knows Bucky wouldn’t make any noise even in absolute silence unless he meant to. What jolts Steve awake is the perception of a presence, that peculiar feeling of someone displacing the air in a previously empty room.

Bucky stands at the foot of the bed, the occasional lightning strike painting him magnesium white and cobalt blue. He’s drenched and dripping, hair plastered to his skull beneath a ballcap.

There’s no trail of water to indicate which direction Bucky came from, how he got in, but Steve couldn’t care less. Bucky’s here, suddenly, like an apparition or a fantasy.

It feels like old times as an asthmatic, now struggling to gather air and wet his mouth. He sits up gingerly and shoves aside the first hundred things he wants to say before croaking, “Hey, Buck.” When he gets no response, he adds, “I’ve been looking for you.”

Bucky has transcended the stillness and rigidity that suggest unease; he’s downright statuesque, forcibly immobile. “I know.” But his voice is the same as it’s always been if a little rusty, a welcome sound in the dark, against the rain. 

A small, watery smile rises to Steve’s lips. “I know you know.”

He’s been under no illusion the last few months. He’s painfully aware that Bucky has been dodging him and probably even propagated a few of the false sightings and dead-end leads that dragged him and Sam across several continents. At first, it agonized him, really and thoroughly gutted him that he wanted so desperately to find Bucky while Bucky didn’t want to be found at all, least by him.

It took one short but serious conversation with Sam to regain perspective. Bucky was doing what seemed best for himself at a time when any certainty about his life and identity had been utterly obliterated. In the end, they agreed to continue searching with the mindset that Bucky wouldn’t let himself be caught until he was ready anyway and that Steve was fundamentally incapable of sitting idly by in the meantime. 

See, he let Bucky down in the Alps, didn’t recover his body before the Soviets and then didn’t know any better to keep looking. It turned out _not knowing any better_ was a worthless excuse in the face of the repercussions that followed. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. If there came a time when Bucky decided he wanted to be found after all, then he damn well deserved to know that Steve hadn’t stopped searching. 

“Do you want a hot shower? A towel?” He sounds remarkably composed, which he’s attributing to shock, but more than that, he’s terrified of gushing emotion all over Bucky and scaring him off. 

“Just a towel.” 

“Okay.” He eases his legs over the side of the bed and hesitates, heart stuttering. “You won’t leave while I’m gone?” 

Bucky regards him for several long seconds, his face inscrutable. “No.” 

All he can do is take Bucky at his word and not force anything. One even-paced step after another, he walks to the bathroom, as if the mere appearance of Bucky hasn’t driven him into a mental tailspin. He’s so overwhelmed the anxiety is actually having a reverse effect in that he can’t think past the next second let alone panic. 

When he returns to his room, Bucky is still there, as promised, albeit naked now. While his sodden clothes have been shed onto the floor in a haphazard pile, Bucky’s boots are neatly paired beside the doorjamb, the hafts of several knives poking out of the empty ankles. But no guns, which Steve interprets as a favorable sign; at least for tonight, Bucky’s not running away from or heading towards anything too dangerous.

Steve only falters for a moment before correcting himself, but in that brief span, he manages to splinter the trim of the doorway his fingers had curled around. Chips of painted wood sprinkle onto the carpet as he hands over the towel. His face is inflamed with embarrassment and helpless desire, and he should avert his eyes, feign nonchalance, but he isn’t actively involved in his decisions right now; he’s just reacting.

So he doesn’t look away.

He absorbs the sight of Bucky’s body, not a fresh stab wound or bullet hole to be found, slimmer maybe but still healthy, so he’s eating decent. Until now, half the reason he assumed Bucky came was because he was too hurt or weak to manage on his own, and in his limited mental Rolodex, Steve was simply the person least likely to kill him.

The ensuing rush of relief allows Steve to take his first proper breath since waking, but it also frees up his mind to consider less immediate concerns. Namely, Bucky being naked and gorgeous as ever and only five feet away from him, and the gnawing, implacable yearning to touch him comes on so strongly that it makes his stomach cramp. 

All the while, Bucky watches himself being watched, drying his hair and wiping away droplets that skitter down his bare skin. Something in Bucky’s posture—almost…provocative in its casualness—and his placid expression tell Steve this display is a test and that his response will inform Bucky how to proceed. 

The manipulation stings, although it serves him right, and the warm, liquid desire in his belly abruptly cools and curdles. It isn’t personal—it can’t be when the other person hardly remembers you. After enduring ineffable abuse and exploitation, it’s beyond understandable—it’s totally _sane_ —that Bucky is still feeling him out. 

That rationale doesn’t make it any easier to accept that Bucky is waiting to see if Steve will hurt or misuse him at the first available opportunity, the first showing of vulnerability. If he’s like all the rest.

“I’ll throw your clothes in the wash. You can have a set of mine.” He finally turns away, afterimages of Bucky’s smooth biceps and compact stomach and solid thighs burned into his retinas, and digs through his drawers for suitable replacements. 

Bucky takes everything but the underwear and slips into socks, sweatpants, and the largest t-shirt Steve has. Instantly, he looks softer, frayed, a favorite toy that’s been played with too hard for too long.

Steve swallows past the lump in his throat, gently approaching to gather the discarded clothes. A tremble runs down his spine as he kneels next to Bucky’s feet. Bucky doesn’t move an inch, either to get away from or make space for him, but his gaze follows Steve down, eyes glistening in an otherwise shadowed face. An insane, fleeting compulsion to lean into Bucky’s leg, rest his forehead against the firm muscle and nuzzle and supplicate to be petted sweetly surges through him and leaves his mouth watering.

Steve inhales sharply and rises to his feet, backing away. “I’ll be right back.” 

His stomach doesn’t churn with nearly as much distress when he leaves Bucky to haul the wet clothes to his machine. Bucky could’ve seized an opportunity to leave already but hadn’t, and honestly, Steve could use the privacy to collect himself.

He dumps the clothes into the washer and slumps against the nearby wall, letting the rhythmic noises of the cycle drown out the rest of the world. He presses his hot cheek against the cool wall and just breathes. It’s not ordinary lust tying his stomach in knots; he feels like he needs to touch Bucky in order to fully appreciate that Bucky is here with him, in person, against impossible odds. And another part of him—a not so small part—just wants Bucky to hold him back, accept him. It’s awful to have all of this love to give and nowhere to put it, no one to take it. It sits heavy and stale and stagnant in his heart—because Bucky used to love him, too, and maybe he never will again.

Bucky stands in the same spot of carpet at the end of the bed, sensing his return but making no show of it. “You draw him more than anyone else,” Bucky notes with Steve’s sketchbook balanced between his hands. “I didn’t expect to come in second though.”

Steve feels queasy, eviscerated. He knows who pops up most frequently within those pages and to hear Bucky cleave himself into _him_ and _I_ is just devastating. His breath catches in his throat as he says, pained, “ _Buck_.”

Bucky flicks his gaze at Steve, angling his chin up warningly, severely, his nostrils flaring. There’s a flash of the same wide, wild panic in his eyes as there was on the helicarriers, his metal fist raised and stuttering in what could’ve been the final blow to crush Steve’s skull. “No.”

Defending Bucky, even from himself, is a hard-wired response that Steve has to choke back and swallow down, his chest heaving. As much as he believes his best friend is still standing in front of him, he can’t be another person who tells Bucky who he is; Steve doesn’t entirely know anymore either. They both have a lot of relearning to do. 

He slowly sidles up to Bucky, peering over his shoulder to see which page holds his attention, although it isn’t necessary. It could only be one page.

The Winter Soldier on the bridge, in leather and metal and goggles and half-mask, at the peak of dehumanization. Not merely featureless but faceless. 

“That’s not you.” He can’t tell Bucky who he _isn’t_ either, but this is his single sticking point. This is the most crucial building block of whoever the new Bucky Barnes will be.

“Yes,” Bucky replies softly, and the fragile regret in his voice is the most emotion Steve has heard from him so far.

“That’s not anyone. That’s a void—an absence of a person.” No one can _be_ the Winter Soldier; it’s a contradiction.

Bucky closes the sketchbook carefully and replaces it on the nightstand, adding distance between them once again. “Does that even matter?” Now his voice is monotonous, colorless, dead. “I did unforgivable things—with his hands and his face. I made him watch. Bucky hates me; so should you.”

God, his lungs feel like they’re being vacuum-sealed, shrunken and deflated. His throat constricts with a tight swallow. “I could never hate you,” he swears.

“I hurt you, the last time I saw you.”

“You saved my life the last time you saw me.” Bucky scowls at him, even more deeply when he realizes Steve is being sincere. “And I recall doing my fair share of damage, breaking your arm.” It had been a necessary cruelty, taking Bucky’s own flesh-and-blood arm out of commission like that, but it had still bruised his heart to do it.

Bucky’s frown dips uncharitably lower. “I busted your face open and shot you—several times—and you still didn’t let me facilitate the murder of millions of people. I’m not in a position to hold a grudge.” He grunts, “Never will be again.”

Steve aches down to his marrow to move closer but knows that Bucky wouldn’t want him to. “I want to help you, but you have to tell me how. Why are you here?”

The muscles in Bucky’s jaw flex and tic as he clamps his teeth together. His posture shifts to a more defensive one, if possible, although he keeps his arms loose at his sides. “I can’t stop thinking about you.” It’s not at all romantic or even nice, the way Bucky says it. It just sounds like one more thing that’s been done to him. “I’m trying to make sense of you. Half of me wants to rub myself all over you like a cat, and the other half wants to crawl out of my skin. What am I supposed to do with that?” 

Peak physical health be damned, Steve is going to have a heart attack tonight. His pulse roars and echoes inside his head like he’s got seashells pressed to both of his ears, muffling his own reply. “Whatever you want, Buck. I’ll follow your lead.”

The spectrum of _whatever_ spans from Bucky embracing to him to Bucky jumping out of the window, and he’s struggling to pinpoint exactly where Bucky falls on it right now, with his tense shoulders risen like hackles and his hands balled into fists. 

Steve’s body locks up in place, muscles urging him to action, to collision, but his resolve won’t let him budge. He means what he’s said. He waits, either for Bucky to come or not come.

Like some unnerving optical illusion, Bucky slinks up to him—one moment meandering in torturous increments, in slow motion, and the next, standing scarcely a foot away, fast-forwarded. Bucky’s eyes are clear, pale blue as he stares unwaveringly, searchingly into Steve’s, boring deep for answers to questions that he doesn’t know how to ask.

An instant before Steve reaches his threshold for restlessness, Bucky says, “Shh.” He doesn’t break his gaze, but his eyes dart side to side and then refocus.

“I didn’t say anything.” 

“Your face is screaming at me, and this is difficult enough already.”

Steve flushes, feeling chastised for apparently emoting too loudly, and whispers, “Sorry.”

Bucky’s brows pinch together, and only when his mouth parts does Steve notice his bottom lip finely quivering. “You really do, don’t you?” Bucky murmurs vaguely and then kisses him square on the mouth.

The confidence must stem from muscle memory because while the rest of Bucky’s body is strung taut and vibrating, his lips are tender and sure and yielding.

Steve whimpers a terrible, desperate, relieved noise into that first kiss and then slots their mouths together, slipping into a rhythm as easily as a needle into a well-worn groove. It’s not even habit so much as instinct to cradle Bucky’s face in his hands and feel the rasp of stubble. His fingers do little more than graze Bucky’s jaw before Steve finds himself slammed backwards into the wall with a metal hand closed around his throat.

He’s not scared. Bucky didn’t put him _through_ the wall, though he might’ve made a sizable dent, and Bucky isn’t choking him, just firmly bracing him while he reestablishes control. 

The next lightning strike catches the shine of Bucky’s lips as he pants from the adrenaline spike, the plates of his arm clicking and realigning like scales.

Steve raises his hands until his knuckles drag against the wall, palms open. “I’m sorry,” he gasps. “I shouldn’t have grabbed. Got a little carried away.” The face and neck are vulnerable areas, and he imagines Bucky felt extremely disadvantaged having someone go for his head without warning. 

Bucky nods tersely, jerkily, and releases him, letting Steve slump from his tiptoes back onto the soles of his feet. “Sorry,” he grunts, hurrying his way through the apology, obviously upset and refusing to look at Steve. Even with his back turned, the agitation rises off of him in invisible waves, like heat shimmering off of blacktop.

As subtly as possible, Steve clears his itchy throat, trying not to draw any further attention to the source of Bucky’s shame and frustration. He doesn’t dare cough. “Just so we’re on the same page, I’ll take another kiss if you’re still offering.”

Bucky’s head whips around forcefully enough that Steve flinches from empathetic whiplash. He looks furious enough to spit. “Another, huh? You want _more_? That really _did something_ for you?” he hisses scathingly with two handfuls of Steve’s t-shirt, his metal fingers tearing into the fabric as if it were tissue paper. 

“ _You_ do something for me.” A line like that, right now, is bound to make Bucky finish that job he started on the drywall.

Instead, Bucky’s mouth drops open, and a yawning silence stretches between them in the space of a few seconds. He exclaims, “You’re a fucking moron!” the way someone would shout _Eureka!_ —like he has made a vital discovery, uncovered a sought-after solution. The enigma of Steve Rogers: solved. “He told me you were. Jesus Christ.” Bucky shakes his head before dissolving into giggles, slouching into Steve’s shoulder for support, and giggling some more.

“You’ve mentioned that a few times over the years, yeah.” He barely turns his face into the tickling caress of Bucky’s hair. It smells like the pillowcases from their old apartment, reminds him of early-morning embraces when Bucky hadn’t put anything in his hair yet. 

“God, just c’mere.” Bucky doesn’t pull at his face either but noses his way up Steve’s throat, over his jaw, until his lips bump back into Steve’s. After a moment, Bucky huffs hot and wet against his mouth. “You can,” he steals another kiss, like it’s easy, like he can’t wait any longer, humming from the back of his throat, “hold me. If you want.”

Until now, Steve’s arms had been hanging limply, unnaturally at his sides, his hands unsure what to do with themselves, and it takes very little goading to accept Bucky’s offer. He still has enough sense to restrict his touch to the neutral zone of Bucky’s back and keep it light, undemanding. He finds his heartrate rocketing just from the curvature of Bucky’s spine underneath the thin cotton shirt, the backside of his ribcage and the protrusion of his shoulder blades. The muscle and bone move sinuously as Bucky twists in his arms and crushes him back against the wall to somehow get deeper into his mouth.

Bucky’s undeniably present, irrefutably alive beneath his hands, and Steve is honest-to-god so enamored by it that even he doesn’t realize the salty taste infiltrating their kisses is his own tears.

Bucky rips apart from him like one of them is on fire, his face a heartrending mosaic of alarm, confusion, and guilt. “Steve?”

His name on Bucky’s tongue, on his breath, for the first time in seventy years doesn’t exactly help staunch the leak he’s sprung. Steve dabs at a teardrop and rubs it between two fingertips, trying to make sense of it all himself. It could’ve been blood, and he doubts he would’ve noticed any sooner with the way Bucky had been touching him. 

Bucky retreats a step, for the benefit of Steve’s safety or his own, he can’t tell. “Steve— _don’t_ ,” he pleads, an edge of panic thinning his voice as he rakes his hands through his hair. “Don’t. Do that. Please—I didn’t mean to. I can’t—” 

“Oh, I’m sorry, Buck.” Aside from the odd wet hiccup, his voice is quite calm and even. He tugs the hem of his shirt up to wipe his face and hopes that Bucky realizes he’s not upset, just emotional. This was the last thing he wanted to do: make an already grueling process even more difficult for Bucky. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” _I missed you, is all_. But he doesn’t want to see Bucky bristle or hear him say that the person Steve misses isn’t here, so he opts for an alternative truth. “I’m just really happy to see you.”

“He told me you were the strongest person he’d ever met but that you had a soft spot.” Bucky pokes one metal fingertip very gently in the center of Steve’s sternum. “And that he was the one who’d put it there. He said you needed looking after.” 

“Seems like you could use some of that yourself.” Bucky snorts, rightly. Between the two of them it does seem like a Sisyphean effort, even on a good decade. “A good night’s sleep wouldn’t be a bad place to start.”

“I sleep,” Bucky says and then shrugs halfheartedly to show he’s not committed to that weak defense either.

“More than an hour at a time?”

“They’re called power naps, and NASA is behind me on their effectiveness,” Bucky mumbles.

“You could stay here tonight, try and get some real rest. I can take the couch.” He adds, “Anyone who wants you’ll have to go through me first.” He meant it as a joke, but it comes out a little too earnest.

Once again, Steve holds his breath and prepares for the worst reaction because he’s asking Bucky to place a lot of trust in him after a very short period of reconnection.

He doesn’t expect Bucky to cock his head and raise one brow in disbelief, as if Steve is exhibiting some strange animal behavior that doesn’t belong to their species. “I was tasting your tonsils two minutes ago, and you’re offering to sleep on the couch?”

“Um.” Reflexively, Steve scratches his eyebrow, a nervous habit leftover from before the ice and the serum. “Buck, I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to bunk together.”

Bucky comes close and prods that same spot over his breastbone, very tenderly. “You can’t fuck me up any more than I already am. _You_ can’t.” To Steve’s ears, it sounds a lot like _you won’t_ , _you wouldn’t_ , _not you_.

Steve sighs, hands on his hips, and lets his head droop because he knows his face is shouting again; he’d just be crucified in poker. A hand smooths over his hair and down the back of his neck, and he relaxes into it, quietly groaning in exasperation. It’s blatantly clear what he wants.

“C’mon,” Bucky coaxes, returning his hands to himself, “we’ll do under-and-over like we did those summers when we were kids.”

Steve startles out of his head. “You remember that?”

Bucky gifts him with a sliver of a smile, sly, barely there, beautiful. “Sure. You—always freezing—under the covers, and me—always roasting—on top.”

Steve’s heart is so full, is beating so hard that it hurts. “That’s right.”

“Probably shouldn’t tuck me in anyways. I don’t always remember where I am right away when I wake up,” Bucky discloses then waits a beat, as if to see whether Steve’s going to withdraw the offer. 

“I’m not worried, Buck.”

“Like I said, a fucking moron.”

“I can handle you, Barnes.” It feels a little too bold, maybe, but he can’t quite regret saying it, so he lets it be.

“Hm,” Bucky answers curtly with a faint, lopsided smile and helps himself to Steve’s dresser. “You need a new shirt. It looks like the Hulk borrowed yours.”

Steve relegates his ruined top to a dust rag, tosses it on the armchair, and changes into the fresh one Bucky hands him. Now there’s nothing left to do but sleep with Bucky—just sleep—which seems like a taller order to carry out than the other option. 

It’s an awkward affair, settling into bed. Steve lags behind, gaze jumping between Bucky and the disheveled bed, the bed and a disheveled Bucky. Finally, he says, “After you,” and does a sweeping gesture with his hand like he’s holding open a damn door instead of inviting his former—hiatal?—lover into his bed.

Bucky shakes his head, chuckling, but takes the left side of the bed like he always did. Steve might’ve called it random or coincidental if it weren’t for Bucky’s body language, his expression. Bucky’s letting himself be read; he wants Steve to know that they’re sharing an old secret, that not everything has been forgotten. 

Steve crawls in after him, dragging the covers up to his shoulders—for whose modesty or comfort, he doesn’t know; in sum total, he believes they’ve spent as much time together naked as clothed. 

“You look like a bundle of two-by-fours under a tarp,” Bucky mutters, despite his eyes being closed. “Relax a little.” He wiggles further down into the bedding and crosses his ankles. “Y’know, the more I remember, the less I mind.”

Steve’s looking his fill while Bucky can’t see him do it, though he suspects Bucky still knows somehow. He never thought he’d have this again: Bucky lounging beside him in bed. How many people get back the one thing in their lives that mattered most and should have been irretrievably lost? “What’s that?”

“You lovin’ me. I don’t resent it, now that we’ve met again properly.”

Steve shuts his eyes for a few long, slow seconds because the waterworks the first time were horrible enough. “Thanks, Buck,” he says softly. “Should I–? Should I call you something else?” 

“Nah. He and I already share everything else. Just gotta break it in, like a new pair of shoes.”

“Okay, then.”

It must be something in his voice that makes Bucky open his eyes and rise up on one elbow, scrutinizing him. When Bucky pulls the covers down past his stomach, Steve grabs hold of them, more suddenly than he means to.

Bucky lets go and lays a hand on his chest. “Easy now, I’m not going for your pants.” His kiss is sweet, uncomplicated, and his thumb brushes back and forth over Steve’s sternum. “You looked like you needed it,” Bucky says and moves back to his side of the bed. “’night, Steve.”

Steve doesn’t know what compels him, but he answers, “Sweet dreams.”

There’s a trace of amusement in Bucky’s smile as he feigns sleep once again. “Well, they’ll be about you, anyway.”

At the end of the month, when Sam’s finished tying up all the loose ends of his DC life, they’re moving to New York. Steve won’t miss this godforsaken apartment, where Fury was purportedly assassinated and he was nonconsensually surveilled by a dubious organization he had pledged himself to. Despite the myriad offers from Sam to crash in his spare room, Steve couldn’t abandon the place while he was still in the city.

It was the last address where the Winter Soldier knew he lived. He’d kept the bullet holes in his living room wall unpatched, so there’d be no mistaking it. He’d taped plastic sheeting over the smashed window and stopped locking the others after that day on the bridge.

Steve hears he has his own floor waiting for him at Avengers Tower, with plenty of room for Sam. Plenty of room for a third person who might also be ready to come home.


End file.
